“[T]he Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gray mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous.”

This passage exemplifies the vivid imagery that characterizes the novel. More importantly, though, the passage emphasizes the contradictions inherent in the Salinas Valley. At once brutal and beautiful, difficult and kind, arduous and rewarding, the Salinas Valley is a physical paradox.

“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation.” 

Here, Steinbeck foreshadows potential conflict between parents and children, while alluding to the love that informs faith. Adam later discovers just how flawed his father really is. After this initial revelation about his father, Adam realizes that he must largely fend for himself in the world—that his father can’t save him from everything.

“Charles had one great quality. He was never sorry—ever. He never mentioned the beating, apparently never thought of it again. But Adam made very sure that he didn’t win again…He had always felt the danger in his brother, but now he understood that he must never win unless he was prepared to kill Charles. Charles was not sorry. He had very simply fulfilled himself.”

This passage solidifies Charles’s character as inherently violent. Steinbeck wants to convey the possibility that Charles’s personality is unchangeable and natural—that he can’t help his outbursts of violence and that they help him deal with his world.